Good stuff from Alex Ross last night at the Wigmore Hall and the Royal Philharmonic Society lecture on the silent(-ish) rituals of the concert hall, an edited version of which you've been reading and commenting on here. There were some other pearls of historical wisdom you won't have heard unless you were there, though (or download the full text here). My favourite phrase, among many, was Alex's description of the no-applause rule as the "Brucknerising of the classical canon", as he pinpointed the start of the no-applause diktat to Bruckner's variously nefarious and antisemitic followers who turned their composer into a cult and the concert hall into a secular cathedral.

But the no-applause thing took a while to catch on. The critic Olin Downes in New York spoke of the suffocating snobbism of audiences showing off their pseudo-superiority by suppressing their desire to applaud musicians. And as late as the 1960s, Arthur Rubinstein complained that the pointlessly reverential silence with which his performances of the first movement of concertos and sonatas were greeted was an insult both to him and to the composer. Amusingly, though, Alex told us that around the same time at a Carnegie Hall concert, Rubinstein shushed the audience when they tried to clap in the "wrong" place; either an ironic gesture or the wilfulness of a great pianist.

What also struck me was how many of the potential innovations Alex suggested – better, more focused lighting (not more, but less! – making the hall darker to concentrate better on what's happening on stage), talks before and after concerts, gigs taking place in intimate club or salon-style surroundings, invitations from the podium for people to applaud whenever they want – have all been happening over the last few years everywhere you look in this country, from the Proms to the City Halls in Glasgow. There's the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment's Night Shift concerts, the South Bank's post-performance mingles with the artists at the Royal Festival Hall's bar, the Roundhouse's recent Reverb festival, the East Neuk's concerts in nuclear bunkers, the boundary-shattering impishness of Roger Norrington at pretty well every concert he ever conducts, just to pick a few examples.

Personally, I no longer feel the no-applause stricture as a rule, and if I were taking somebody to their first concert, the advice would be to applaud when you want (OK, ideally not in the middle of the slow movement), rather than suppress all urges to express delight at what you're hearing. Having said that: for those people who break the silent spell at the end of a great performance of a Mahler symphony or the Tchaikovksy Pathétique, there can be no mercy. As Alex said, it's about respecting what each piece of music, and each performance, demands, not having hard-and-fast regulations. And there are times when no applause is the only appropriate response.